The Icelandic fishing village of Flateyri was devastated when an avalanche buried 17 homes in 1995. To guard against further trouble, they built an earthen dam in the shape of an enormous A.
It worked: An avalanche struck the dam’s eastern wing in February 1999, and another struck the western wing the following March. Both were deflected harmlessly into the sea.
C. Wiltberger created this allegorical map of temperance in 1838 (click to enlarge). The goal is to get from the Ocean of Animal Appetite in the west to the Ocean of Eternity in the east. It would be natural enough to investigate Indulgence and Generosity Islands, but this will lead you to Evil Company Island, and once you’re through the Devil’s Trap you’ll have to negotiate the Sea of Intemperance, with its islands of Murder, Arson, Larceny, and Quarrel. Beyond the Great Gulf of Wretchedness lies the Sea of Anguish, which puts you out at Suicide Island (and its capital, Spontaneous Combustion).
The better plan is to head north immediately and enter the Cold Water River at Hope Island. Bear south at Knowledge toward Cultureville and Mount Science and take the Tee Total Rail Road to the Sea of Temperance, and then head north through the Old Age Outlet past Comfortville and Restburg and safely into Eternity. (Beware the Gulf of Broken Pledges — even at this late stage, it will lead you directly to Desperation Point.)
My favorite part: Poverty Island has a port called Nosupper.
When detectives explored the Chicago hotel owned by insurance fraudster H.H. Holmes in 1894, they found a nightmarish warren of blind passageways, trapdoors, hidden chutes, and asphyxiation chambers in which Holmes had killed dozens or perhaps even hundreds of victims. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the career of America’s first documented serial killer, who headlines called “a fiend in human shape.”
We’ll also gape at some fireworks explosions and puzzle over an intransigent insurance company.
Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay erected this sculpture in Stuttgart in 1975.
The engraving appears meaningless until it’s viewed across a body of water — and the German word schiff (ship) floats reflected on the surface.
Berkeley software engineer Stephen Malinowski creates animated graphical scores of musical works.
“The vertical positions of the bars on the screen represent the relative pitches, while the color can represent instruments or voices, thematic material or tonality,” explains Crétien van Campen in The Hidden Sense. “When they are synchronized, the sound and image are easily linked in our perception. Musical structures like Bach’s canons or his many-voiced compositions thus become understood and accessible by means of a visual aid.”
There’s much more on Malinowski’s YouTube channel; here are some of his favorites.
At one point in Samuel Beckett’s 1951 novel Molloy, the title character finds himself at the seaside and “lays in a store of sucking stones”:
They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones.
It occurs to him that this method won’t ensure that every stone is eventually sucked, and he works out a plan that will achieve this. This takes eight pages, “one of the longest and most detailed accounts of someone working at a mathematical problem in a work of fiction,” according to Richard Phillips in Numbers: Facts, Figures and Fiction.
Maddeningly, in the end Molloy throws away all the stones but one, “for they all tasted exactly the same.”
For his Historical Atlas of 1830, Edward Quin took a different approach than other cartographers: Rather than present history as a series of discrete moments, he illustrates the growth of knowledge by covering the earth in obscuring clouds that are beaten back from panel to panel.
“In Quin’s Historical Atlas, the world is shown first in darkness, with clouds obscuring everything outside the Garden of Eden,” note Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg in Cartographies of Time. “Gradually, as history reveals more of the world, the clouds roll back. Turning the pages of the atlas is a bit like riffling through a flip book, watching darkness recede and the world known to Europeans grow.”
In 1970, shortly after the first lunar landing, rocket scientist Ernst Stuhlinger received a letter from missionary Sister Mary Jucunda in Zambia asking how the government could justify spending billions of dollars on space exploration when so many children on Earth were starving to death. He responded with a story:
About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the count’s household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.
The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose. ‘We are suffering from this plague,’ they said, ‘while he is paying that man for a useless hobby!’ But the count remained firm. ‘I give you as much as I can afford,’ he said, ‘but I will also support this man and his work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!’
Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.
The count, by retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community.
Stuhlinger’s whole letter is here (PDF). “Although our space program seems to lead us away from our earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars,” he wrote, “I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much attention and study by space scientists as our earth.”
pernicity
n. swiftness, quickness, agility
discoverture
n. the state of not having a husband
supersalient
adj. leaping upon
desponsate
adj. married
The Fenway Millionaires also have a ‘sleeper’ in Norm Zauchin, a massive fellow just out of the Army. Don’t underestimate him. When he was at Birmingham he pursued a twisting foul ball into a front row box. He clutched frantically. He missed grabbing the ball but he did grab a girl, Janet Mooney. This might not be considered a proper introduction by Emily Post but it worked for Zauchin. He married the gal. Nope. Don’t underestimate an opportunist like that.
— Arthur Daley, “Life Among the Millionaires,” New York Times, March 11, 1954
In 1895, when a Chicago landowner failed to pay his taxes, a bidder acquired a claim to the east one-vigintillionth part of the lot. The insurance company tried to foreclose, arguing that the owner had allowed a cloud to come on the title by the loss of this small fraction. But the county court held that a vigintillionth (1/1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000) was practically nothing, as “its width would be so fine that the most powerful magnifying glass ever made could not discover it: it would be utterly incapable of physical possession.” In a little rhapsody, the Northwestern Law Review agreed:
If the surface of the earth were rolled out flat and a vigintillionth sold off the east side and sold to pay the taxes of the owner thereof, the purchaser at the tax sale would get a strip about 500 quin-decillionths of an inch wide. Hardly large enough for even a Pingree potato patch.
If the holder of the fee simple title to the section of space between the earth and the sun, (taken at 93,000,000 miles), should be unfortunate enough to be sold out to the tax buyer, he would, if he failed to redeem, lose title to a strip along one side of his holding, (say next the sun), some 140 qual decillionths of an inch in width.
Or, if the ‘unknown owner’ of the space between here and the nearest fixed star, (Alpha Centauri), something like twenty million millions of miles from the Northeast corner of Randolph and State Sts. should be unfortunate in his real estate venture and fall into the greedy hands of the tax buyer, he would have to yield up dominion over a strip on the East side of his subdivision some 645 dio decellionths of an inch across.
So did the Economist. But a higher court reversed the ruling, arguing that although a vigintillionth of the property “could not be appreciated by the senses, it is recognizable by the mind,” and that its existence left the rest of the property inaccessible by the street on the east side.
This must be some odd trend of American law in the 1890s — in his Strangest Cases on Record (1940), John Allison Duncan mentions another such case in Arapahoe County, Colorado. He includes a photograph of the certificate of purchase.
